I was watching a Neil DeGrasse Tyson video and he had a copy of a Nasa Spinoff book. I hadn’t see this publication before, but it is really friggin’ cool.

It’s an annual publication of Nasa technology that has been successfully applied outside of Nasa. I knew that there were lots of pieces of Nasa tech that made there way into our daily lives, but I didn’t know that there were SO many, and SO many on a yearly basis. Really neat stuff. I’m really looking forward to going through some of the previous years and finding neat finds.

In my opinion Legos are the quintessential toy! Every child and adult alike should have legos. They are fun, simple and they put your brain to work in very productive three dimensional ways. You can bet that I will have a toy from each of these categories on my upcoming list, but there are likely to be a couple lego sets.

Helicopters

I am not much of a gas station impulse buyer, but the little $19 counter router desktop helicopters that you keep seeing pop up in every store that sells anything do keep sucking me in. I probably have the bits and pieces of ten of these in my parts bin by now. They are fun for a day or three, but I am way too tough on these things to expect one to stay around longer than that. There were recently some “TacoCopters” in the news and even one with a video (here) a counter-rotor helicopter in a cage to keep it intact longer that put ideas into my head. So maybe there is hope for a future Frankenstein version of all these little copters, but for now they are a rubbermaid box full of parts.

Drones

This is where I would probably spend all of my money and time if I could. I am still totally in love with drones, and will continue to play with them for years to come. So for the bottom of my Category list, but the top of my list for Santa, you can be sure to find a drone!

I have spent many hours playing with my drone, and spent quite a bit of money as well. My favorite drone, and the one I have written about the most is the Parrot.AR Drone Quadricopter.

I am starting to look more and more at some of the amazing open source projects that are coming online though, and I am getting Reeeeeally excited. With large communities all contributing to projects like these we can push this technology, have fun, and break toys more impressively than ever before!

OpenPilot is a Open Source community project and there are many ways you can contribute. You can help in development of the Flight Software (the embedded firmware) and/or the Ground Control Software.

Apart from development, there are many other ways to be part of the project: helping with documentation, flight testing or simply suggesting improvements. This is a community project so please get involved!

Honestly, with so much new exciting technology out there, it motivates me to go get to work and make more money, just so I can spend it on RC equipment.

This is one of the best party games out there, you can literally play with anyone, and part of the game is adjusting your answer based on what you think the other players know. So it’s not like a trivial persuit knock off where your friend who has never seen startrek will NEVER get that last wedge, and it’s much more user friendly for people who have no idea how to draw, unlike win-lose-or-draw. It really is a fun, easy to learn and play game that has infinite variation. I plan on introducing my family to it at christmas this year, it will be our after christmas dinner entertainment!

I am really liking these new ninjago lego sets, I was never really a fan of the pre-molded lego pieces, and the dragon heads on these come as one piece and are made of a rubber, not the traditional hard plastic. At least they will be a little softer if I play with them drunk, leave them out and step on one the next morning while I am nursing my hangover.

Several crashes from my twelve foot ceiling to the tile floors have not caused discernible damage. I did manage to nick the counter rotating main rotors several times as I found furniture edges and ceiling beams; sanding the nicks was necessary to get things back into perfect balance. But that was really easy to do with an emery board, a dremel may have even been too much.

The rear rotor is horizontally oriented and it only comes on when forward or reverse stick is applied. The main rotors control up-down, right-left flight operations. Superb piece of workmanship and fine design. Comes with a separate charging cord so you can charge from your laptop USB port, thus saving the battery life in the controller.

About

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The we I was talking about above kind of just became ME. When I started the blog there were a few of us reviewing toys, but now I am kind of the captain, crew and passengers of this R/C ship. Which is fine. At least I still have readers eagerly awaiting us at port every time we show up with a nice new shiny review!
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